Event

LAST DAYS IN VIETNAM

Director Rory Kennedy live via Skype for Q&A

The most compelling means of narrating history is awareness of the impact of events on individual men and women; to see and hear and understand the very human process of making fateful decisions and the consequences of those choices. Emmy award winning director Rory Kennedy's documentary takes the viewer into the chaotic, traumatic weeks of the U.S. military presence in Vietnam in 1975.

As North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops moved toward Saigon, the highly fortified United States Embassy was surrounded by Vietnamese men and women, mostly those who assisted the United States in the previous decade, seeking refuge and escape. This led to a terrible moral dilemma: who stays and who gets left behind?

Interviews with the American Ambassador Graham Martin, C.I.A. operatives in Saigon at the time, Pentagon official Richard Armitage, U.S. marines on duty in the embassy and South Vietnamese citizens desperate to escape are woven together to give multiple perspectives.

Kennedy identifies the perceptions and illusions which shaped events. Ambassador Martin stalled making plans for evacuation. He strongly believed the United States could not lose and no South Vietnamese would need to evacuate. As events unwound and reality set in Martin became a "masterpiece of ambiguity". Other interviews manifest moral agony. Given the delays in planning, evacuation by helicopters, which can hold limited numbers, became the last viable option for saving former allies from incarceration in Communist "re-education" camps or possible death. For Army Caption Stuart Herrington "it was so serious and deep a betrayal". Rory Kennedy brilliantly documents both the last days in Vietnam and the lasting traumas of those days over decades. Marty Haas

USA, 2014, 98 min., NR | Director: Rory Kennedy | Sundance 201